A client sponsored a triage of one of their high-value business processes, one that receives and evaluates eligibility requests for a financial benefit. One triager’s point-of-pain was an observation that 70% of requests required rework — reaching out and contacting the applicant for additional information. How or why this information was not captured at the first attempt became an improvement to analyze.

But what is the cost of 70% rework? Inquiring minds want to know. (You can be sure this 70% will be laser-focused fixed now that the team sees it. To their credit, it’s an all-hands-on-deck effort. Some of this rework is caused by unverifiable info from applicants — garbage in.)

I suspected it was exponential — at least non-linear, assuming each attempt had the same probability of failure for illustration purposes. Naturally, real data would adjust this accordingly.

What it tells us is you’ll process twice as many requests as you need to when your re-touch rates are 40% or so. You’re processing three times as many customer touches at about 70% rework. That’s two-thirds of your resources unavailable do something else! The chart gets crazy-ugly at failure rates above 70%, by the way.

We call that kind of process failure a dumpster fire. At 70% rework or customer re-touch, two thirds of your touches are avoidable if your process is designed to deliver a one-and-done customer experience.

The remedy is a blinding flash of the obvious: Reason-code every failure, sort the volume of these reasons using Pareto rules, resolve them in highest-volume order, and raise first attempt success to something less than 10% for starters. If automated systems are used to capture the required information, present it list or check boxes, mandatory field captures, use good scan-and-attach tools, and by all means attempt to educate the benefits applicant on what’s needed before attempting. Here’s my spreadsheet.

Process Triaging is a decision cycle leaders follow to generate purposeful improvement solutions and then select and implement the best of them.

The cycle works when its driven from deep within our leadership philosophy — our culture. A culture of continuous improvement that is not driven by surface events — by waves.

The improvements we find and undertake will shield our enterprises from storms and rough waters. Triaging is a tactic we apply as rudder adjustments at the helm — minor course corrections. But the practice of triaging — constantly cycling into the best ideas, keeps us centered in the most productive current. Something that carries us along in the right direction regardless of the wind and waves.

“The executive staff will be taking the improvements you triage today very seriously. After the host’s implementation plan is approved, the selected improvements will be part of our performance review and bonus schedule.”

Think about that.

The triage’s executive sponsor places so much trust and faith in the triaging process, that the CEO and principal staff will hold themselves accountable for improvement proposals nominated and prioritized bottoms-up, by those who live and breath the daily work — before they know what they are!

Here’s a video clip of this triage team ranking their improvement solutions. Notice how the culture created by their executives engages and empowers them.

This company will stay in the right currents.

Their culture is correct and runs deep.

http://processtriage.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/logopng2-300x110.png00Joseph Rosenbergerhttp://processtriage.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/logopng2-300x110.pngJoseph Rosenberger2016-05-09 22:21:072016-05-10 15:19:48Culture is a Current, Not a Wave